Pinboard: bookmarks for matthewmcvickar tagged 'hiphop'

Brandon Soderberg: Rappers and Same-Sex Marriage: How Much Do You Really Care? (Spin)

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

homosexuality gay hiphop rap celebrity writing music culture politics
12 hours ago by matthewmcvickar

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Daphne Carr: It's 2012 and it's Nicki Minaj's world to make, but this album is not going to make it (Capital New York)

Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it's time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”

music writing pop hiphop
3 days ago by matthewmcvickar

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Ian Cohen: Killer Mike — R.A.P. Music (Pitchfork)

Limiting himself to one producer, legends-only guest spots, and a real sense that he'd better make this one count, Killer Mike rises to the occasion.

music hiphop
11 days ago by matthewmcvickar

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Nitsuh Abebe: a quick addendum to that Lil B piece (a grammar)

His homemade philosophy is such that he can just wander around trying to be honest and respectful of others, and how they react to that effort is entirely their problem, not his. This is why no pockets of ickiness in the audience reaction feel particularly sad.

writing music lilb hiphop speech personality celebrity
6 weeks ago by matthewmcvickar

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Brandon Soderberg: Nicki Minaj and 2 Chainz’ ‘Beez in the Trap’ (SPIN)

Nicki employs street hardness as a signifier of how great she is at rapping, not as an attempt to actually convince anybody that she's "hood" or any of that authenticity nonsense. She's successfully occupying the trap, ground zero for hardness, and calling its inhabitants "bitches," all to prove that she is the consummate rhyming bad-ass.

music pop hiphop rap criticism writing
9 weeks ago by matthewmcvickar

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SPIN.com: Defending Dyson's Georgetown Jay-Z Class

‘Jay-Z’s lyrics would work just fine in a literature or poetry class (Decoded is basically his own Norton Critical Anthology of Jigga), but that's irrelevant to this discussion because, as nearly everyone who mocked the course seemed to ignore, Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z's career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.’

jayz hiphop music america sociology michaelericdyson
november 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Alex Pappademas: Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

hiphop music culture
november 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Grantland: Hua Hsu on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne

“What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.”

music hiphop economy class america
august 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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The Daily: Label maker

“Still, for the Cool Kids, it comes down to one thing: Mountain Dew provides them with a fair opportunity to usher their music into the world. ‘Any other label, any other situation … you do all the work and they take all the money. I can’t sleep comfortably with that,’ explains Rocks. ‘I would take Mountain Dew any day of the week over that. Money comes and goes, you spend it stupid and it’s gone. But what we are doing, what we’ve made — no one can take that away from us.’”

hiphop musicindustry
july 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Village Voice: Music: Tyler, the Creator’s Boy’s Club

“The highest points and most infuriating moments on ‘Goblin’ come from the fact that it’s a vérité depiction of the worst aspects of American boy culture. You know, hating girls because they don’t like you because you’re a weirdo, hating any and all authority figures because they try to tell you how not to be such a weirdo. But most importantly (and scarily), there’s the part that involves lashing out about being viewed as a weirdo, and being summarily rewarded—i.e. seen as normal—for doing so. (It probably goes without saying that girls don’t have the same luxury.) Nobody cares about Tyler the Creator being someone’s role model in 2011. Which in a way, is the scariest thing about ‘Goblin’—too much of his scary fantasizing, for too many boys, is all too normal.”

culture gender music ofwgkta hiphop musicwriting
may 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Pitchfork: Odd Future Mixtapes

“A year ago, when nobody knew who they were, the demonic L.A. skate-rat rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All cranked out music at an alarming rate. And now that nobody will shut up about them, they’re still doing the same thing. Since 2008, Odd Future have released no fewer than 12 full-length albums, as well as assorted between-releases singles — all available free on their Tumblr. Some of those releases are brilliant, paradigm-shifting works of violent vision. Others are entirely forgettable. Almost all of them are worth your hard-drive real estate, and almost all of them will confound you in one way or another. Below, you'll find a guide to every single one of those albums, from their introductory 2008 ‘The Odd Future Tape’ to Frank Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra.’, the experimental R&B tape that the crew released just a few weeks ago.”

hiphop history music free reference
march 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Rap Genius

‘Discover the Meaning of Rap Lyrics’

This is actually well-maintained and awesome, from the two songs I looked at.

hiphop humor music rap reference
january 2011 by matthewmcvickar

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Fuse.tv: Listen Closely by B Michael Payne: Love the Music, Ignore the Message: How Critics Are Failing Odd Future

"Overall, there seems to be a critical disconnect between the way the predominantly white, male critical establishment writes about violence and misogyny—especially as it’s primarily exhibited in hip-hop, i.e., music made predominantly by black artists. Critics such as these seem uncommonly drawn to violent, misogynistic music simply because it is shocking. This thrill of novelty seems to be nothing more than a fetishization of an alien culture."

music writing criticism misogyny culture america hiphop rap lyrics
november 2010 by matthewmcvickar

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The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive

"Have you ever started rapping along with some song on the radio and then realized that you don't know the lyrics? Now you don't have to worry about that embarrassing moment when it happens in front of your friends. OHHLA.com is your one stop shop for rap and hip-hop lyrics."

hiphop rap music lyrics reference archive culture america database
november 2010 by matthewmcvickar

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The Guardian: The hip-hop heritage society

On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"

hiphop music musicbusiness history culture
november 2010 by matthewmcvickar

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Slate: "The rise of no homo and the changing face of hip-hop homophobia" by Jonah Weiner

"When these rappers say 'no homo,' it can seem a bit like a gentleman's agreement, nodding to the status quo while smuggling in a fuller, less hamstrung notion of masculinity. This is still a concession to homophobia, but one that enables a less rigid definition of the hip-hop self than we've seen before. It's far from a coup, but, in a way, it's progress."

music language sociology hiphop queer homophobia
august 2009 by matthewmcvickar

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